DANCE REVIEW : Power of Martha Graham Carries on in San Diego

Early in Martha Graham’s “Temptations of the Moon,” a dancer solos on a darkened stage while 16 corps members wait in the wings. Suddenly, Bela Bartok’s score surges into a dynamic, declarative statement--a passage so forceful that nearly any other choreographer, male or female, would have sent in the men at this point.

Not Graham. A few women are all she needs to embody such an assertion of power, and the choice reminds us how far ahead her work remains in pursuing an ideal of absolute equality.

Boasting (as always) some of the finest African-American, Asian and Latino dancers in America, the Graham company arrived at San Diego Civic Theatre on Friday for a two-night retrospective, part of its first national tour since Graham’s death last April.

Most companies suffer either upheaval or paralysis following the death of their founding choreographers, but the crises for the Graham institution came while she was alive. Now, if anything, the company looks well on the way to evolving a potent new style, one that downplays psychological complexity in Graham’s work and emphasizes movement design.

Immediately evident in the bold attacks and heightened contrasts of the corps dancing, this style springs in part from the specific interests and capabilities of young American dancers and also from the requirements of performing in enormous opera houses.

Instead of focusing on histrionics--and on the impossible task of matching Graham’s interpretive genius and star power as a performer--it relishes every twist and turn of Graham’s daring, devious imagination. In the shift, the lady who helped invent modern dance suddenly becomes a bona fide post -modernist, with all her meaning found in her movement and spatial choices.

Nothing, either night, surpassed the ovation for “Steps in the Street” from 1936, in which Graham contrasted the isolation of one woman with the geometric patterning and unison drive of 11 others. Essentially defined through spatial composition alone, the solo role (danced by Denise Vale) never had more complex or virtuosic steps than the corps dancing but nonetheless emerged as a symbol of the suffering outcast engulfed in fascist energy.

Its startling authenticity was nearly matched by the performance of the trio “El Penitente,” from 1940. Here, in a passion play inspired by Southwestern ritual, Graham investigated the metaphysical implications of stagecraft and, especially, role-playing, with extraordinary delicacy.

While some company principals continue to emote more impressively than they dance, the wave of the future looks to be Terese Capucilli. Whether cast as the Crescent Moon in “Temptations of the Moon” (1986), as a troubled Eve in “Embattled Garden” (1958) or a parodistic replica of Graham herself in “Maple Leaf Rag” (1990), she seems to soak up the essence of the choreography and exude it from every pore.

Even Capucilli can’t turn back the clock, can’t give us the Graham experience that existed when dancing actors flourished on stages a third this size. However, what she, some of the other principals and nearly the whole corps can do is bring Graham’s choreography to the dawn of the 21st Century as a series of audacious, inimitable movement events: a life’s work honed and refocused for many lifetimes to come.